With a new blog created every second, how are you going to keep up with 900 000 posts a day across 15-million blogs? These blogs (short for web logs) are online journals written by people who might be talking about your organisation, or sharing information that could help you do your job. And if you have a company blog, how will customers find it among the millions of alternatives?
Traditional search engines are struggling to keep up with the rate at which people update their blogs, and specialist blog tracking sites such as Technorati and Bloglines have sprung up to help.
Search engines like Google treat blogs like any other website, and even the large numbers of blogs are a drop in the ocean compared to the rest of the web. As a result, they often get drowned out in search results. Clive Longbottom, an analyst from Quocirca, thinks that’s not necessarily a bad thing for normal searches. ”Who wants to have blog search results in the upper reaches of Google, MSN or Yahoo search results? Blogs, by their very nature, are personal thoughts and have therefore not gone through any editorial or peer control,” he says.
If you want customers to find content from your company blogs, one solution is to include them on your regular website. Microsoft, for example, automatically pulls relevant content from employee blogs on to its product pages, along with threads from newsgroups, lists of chats and webcasts, security bulletins and other information that can be retrieved via web feeds such as RSS (Really Simple Syndication).
However, people searching specifically for blog posts should get better results from services such as Technorati, Blogpulse, Bloglines, IceRocket, Feedster, Rojo, Blinkx and PubSub. Some concentrate on blogs, others include any RSS feed. Some services crawl the web looking for blogs, some rely on blog software telling them about new posts — and some do both.
Most blogging software includes the option to notify sites like Technorati when you make a post. David Sifry, Technorati’s chief executive, says that on average, a post is indexed five minutes after you make it, and Bloglines aims to do the same. But if your hosting service doesn’t offer that option, and doesn’t make blogs available via RSS or Atom feeds, it’s harder for the search sites to track it. Although users can always register their blogs with the blog search engines.
Last week, Feedster came up with a list of what it considers the top 500 blogs, but it excluded blogs from several hosted systems, such as LiveJournal, for technical reasons. Does that mean hosted blogs don’t get indexed as well as those created with more sophisticated software such as Movable Type? Not necessarily.
Feedster’s chief executive officer Scott Rafer points out that its search does cover hosted blogs, as well as RSS feeds from professionally published sites, as do the other services. Indeed, Sifry finds the standard templates of hosted services make them easier for Technorati to index.
Blinkx chooses how often to index a site not by how it’s created or hosted but based on how often it comes up in search results. There’s a sliding scale from sites that show up regularly and therefore get indexed every hour to those that are looked at only every three days.
Blog search also differs from web search in how the results are ranked. Most search tools show you the most recent posts first. According to Mark Fletcher of Bloglines: ”With blog searches you’re looking for timeliness; with a web search you’re looking for authoritative results”.
But you will also want to know how many people read a blog regularly: popularity doesn’t guarantee credibility, but if a blog is influential, you need to know if your business or product is mentioned.
Searches also take into account how often a blog is updated and who links to it, though the issue of how to count and rate links is contentious. Some blogging services include automatic links that can skew the results, as can spam blogs crammed with links. Sifry talks about identifying bloggers who consistently start the stories others pick up, rather like tracking the outbreak of an epidemic and developing the equivalent of ”PageRank for people”.
Most of the services also let you save searches on the site. That provides a way to skim through blogs you already know about.
All the blog search services agree that the tools are still in development. They’re not going to be the only players in the game, either. Bloglines’ Mark Fletcher says we can expect to see blog search as a tool on every major search engine in the next six to nine months. This may lead to some takeovers. Ask Jeeves now owns Bloglines, and is putting the Bloglines notifier on its front page, while Intelliseek owns BlogPulse. Technorati is designing its own service for corporate tracking and business intelligence.
Tracking blogs is a lot of work, and most of the time you won’t find anything significant. But it’s starting to matter. As IceRocket’s chief executive Blake Rhodes puts it: ”If you’re a business owner and you don’t care about what bloggers are saying, you don’t care about your business.” – Guardian Unlimited Â